A Cracker Of An Idea, Then And Now

The Age

Thursday May 4, 2006

DANNY KATZ

My latest gig reminds me of when I was a shocking wolf in sheep's clothing.

THE Melbourne International Comedy Festival is just about finished, and it's been a pretty good one this year. There's been some great comedy from performers such as Akmal Saleh, and Danny Bhoy, and also Lano and Woodley, who are doing their big final farewell show, so the evening was both hilarious and a little bit poignant - at times, the audience didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so we all just sat there as one, making a weird HARRR-snfffff HARRR-snffffff noise.

But there's one great comedy show still to come, and it may well be the biggest, most mind-blowing show of all - and that's because it has me in it, so it promises to be both outrageously funny and also a little gratingly annoying, in a nasally Canadian way. But in truth, I'm just hosting this show; other comedians will be making it funny. It's called Score Reloaded, and it's a classical music extravaganza at the Melbourne Town Hall on Saturday, with the 90-piece Melbourne Youth Orchestra doing lots of funny classical music stuff.

And the reason I'm only hosting this show is that I don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to performing classical music and comedy. This was demonstrated about three years ago when I presented a charming little symphonic treat at the Town Hall with the Australian Classical Players, a show simply titled R-Rated Peter and the Wolf, also known as Danny Does Dubrovnik.

Just about everybody would know Sergei Prokofiev's much-loved musical masterpiece, Peter and the Wolf. Well, I came up with a slightly cheekier version, a slightly naughtier version, a slightly RAUNCHIER, SMUTTIER, PORNIER, ADULTS-ONLY VERSION, containing material you don't normally get in a classical music concert - hey, you wouldn't get this kind of material on a website called GermanGrannies.com.

In my delightfully whimsical adaptation, Peter is a 42-year-old Russian man with serious mental health issues and an unusual fondness for animals - in particular, one very foxy wolf. (Apparently my version is much closer to the original written by Prokofiev in 1936, and many believe this is why Stalin came down so hard on the poor man.)

Anyway, I'm not sure if it was the fault of the publicist or the audience, but somehow people didn't seem to notice the R-Rated bit on all the show's advertisements, and many came along expecting to see a fun-filled classical concert for all the family - so when I stepped out on the stage with a 50-piece orchestra and gazed into the auditorium, I was confronted with the smiling, eager faces of children, parents, and an entire front row made up of classical music subscribers, all of them over-dressed, over-excited, and over 70.

The orchestra started playing, and I started narrating, and everything was going really really well - for about 10-and-a-half seconds - and after I finished saying, "Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to the show", I launched into my R-rated bestial filth. There was just a stunned silence from the crowd - interrupted only by schoolboy sniggers from some teenagers up the back, a few pitiful chuckles from a compassionate bassoon player in the woodwind section, and a strange, distant whirring noise that was either the Town Hall air conditioning, or the sound of Prokofiev spinning in his grave all the way over in Moscow.

Performing comedy is hard enough when you just have to stand up in front of a bunch of people and try to make them laugh, but it gets even more difficult when you have to stand in front of a row of appalled elderly people, all of them with mouths hanging open, chins resting on their laps, and dentures falling to the ground, making little DUNK DUNK DUNK sounds.

Still, I soldiered on; I did all my tasteless oboe/genital gags, I did my countless French horn/erection jokes, I did my whole bit about Peter getting intimate with birds, cats, ducks, rabbits and every other multi-cellular Russian life form. At one point, I heard a kid saying to his mother: "Mum, why is Peter doing that to the wolf?"

After the show, nobody really knew what to do; the string section just escaped out a back exit and disappeared down a laneway, the producer just walked right past and said, "We'll talk on the phone . . . and debrief", and an old lady waiting in the foyer angrily threatened me with a rolled-up brochure for Musica Viva.

So that's why I'll just be hosting Score Reloaded, and I guarantee this will be a genuinely fun-filled family concert. Although I might grab the producer afterwards and pitch my next great classical music idea: an R-rated Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, featuring a very large mallet.

© 2006 The Age

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